Assignment

Subject : 18th and 19th Century Novel

Topic : Autobiographical Elements in

George Eliot’s Mill on The Floss.

Presented to : Mr. Saleem Khan

Presented by : Duaa Hassan

Sayeda Hassan

Mahnoor Khattak

Momna Shahid

Misbah Mehmood

Hamna Tahir

Class : BS English 4 (A)

Date : 25th December 2019

 Autobiographical Elements in George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss

Biography:
Mary Ann Evans, better known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English
Victorian novelist. She was born on November 22, 1819 and passed away on December 22nd
of 1880. She is most famous for developing psychological analysis characteristic of modern
fiction. From a young age she had been educated more than the women of her time and had a
keen intelligent personality. She spent her early years in the countryside. This is clearly
depicted in most of her novels. She had some siblings that were the basis for some of her
characters. Mill on the floss is her most autobiographical novel. it is not entirely
autobiographical as its story differs largely from her own life. Even so resemblance is observed
in some of the characters of the novel with some of her family members. The first few chapters
are rich in her own experiences. The story then develops into a different scenario.

Resemblance of Maggie and Mary Ann (George Eliot):

The Mill on the Floss in which Maggie Tulliver, is the key character lives in a
family in which she has been discriminated against by her family members and even other
people in the society because of the blackness of her eyes and hair, and her dark skin. People
know her as an evil girl because of the blackness that she owns. But oppositely, Maggie tries
to change their negative views to her by being kind and having good behaviour. Maggie has
biographical resemblance with George Eliot. She suffers from some tragedies because Eliot
did the same.
Maggie is a talented and intelligent girl growing up at Dorlcote Mill and she is
the protagonist of this story. The novel follows Maggie when she grows up into an outstanding
and unconventional young lady. She grows up between strict social customs and yields them.
Even as a young girl, she does not fit to be the representation of an accepted girl. Although,
she is insubordinate, and bad-tempered, but she is also extremely smart. She never uses dialect,
even in the beginning chapters of the novel when she is a child and not educate. Such lucid
utterance as a little child is obviously meant to confirm Maggie’s outstanding cleverness as
well as her dissimilarity from her family.
“But if Maggie had been that young lady, you would probably have known nothing about her:
her life would have had so few vicissitudes that it could hardly have been written; for the
happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.”
-George Eliot
Maggie resembles George Eliot in different ways
 She has curly hair and is ill mannered as George Eliot was in her childhood.
 Mrs. Tulliver found Maggie “half an idiot” if she sent Maggie upstairs for something
she would forget the reason and “sit down in the sunshine, plait her hair and sing to
herself like a bedlam creature”
 Maggie’s nature is impulsive as her creator. They both had unmanageable hair and
dressed up the same way.
 Books like “The pilgrims Progress” and “History of the Devils” were the favourite of
Eliot as well as Maggie.
 The mental sharpness, the clinging affectionateness, the ambition, the outlook beyond
the present, the religious & moral pre occupations, the thirst for knowledge, the spiritual
 conflicts, the passionate high thinking are some common things between Maggie &
George Eliot
 Like Maggie, George Eliot too used to speculate when she was younger that smaller
fish would Come to her and bigger to Tom

Maggie’s relation with her brother Tom:

George Eliot's most deeply autobiographical novel is Mill on the Floss. "Mrs.
Lewes" was, of course, George Eliot, and "the tragic story" on which she was working so
damply was The Mill on the Floss, published by Blackwood 150 years ago. What was making
Eliot cry had to write the last few pages of her novel in which the heroine Maggie Tulliver and
her estranged brother Tom drown in the swollen River Floss locked together "in an embrace
never to be parted".
More than mere melodrama, the watery hug represented a wishful reworking of
Eliot's fractured relationship with her own adored brother, with whom she had grown up on the
Warwickshire family farm in the 1820s. Ever since she had written to Isaac Evans three years
before to explain that she was now cohabiting in London with the married Lewes – "Mrs.
Lewes" was a term of social convenience, her legal name remained Mary Ann Evans – the
rigidly respectable Isaac had refused to have anything to do with her. Even more hurtfully, he
had instructed their sister to break off contact too. This silence was to stretch bleakly over the
coming quarter of a century. The brother and sister who, like Tom and Maggie, had once
"roamed the daisies fields together" in loving childhood, would never meet again
Literary theorists tend not to approve of reading novels as if they were
fictionalized autobiography. Still, it is a stern critic who would deny readers the pleasure of
spotting which parts of her own childhood George Eliot transferred to Tom and Maggie. The
dynamics and personalities of the Tulliver family are remarkably similar to what we know of
the Evans’s. Mr Tulliver, the hot-headed miller, is described as finding "the relation between
spoken and written language, briefly known as spelling, one of the most puzzling things in this
puzzling world", and you only have to glance at the diaries of Eliot's father, Robert Evans, to
realise that he too was an uncertain penman.
George Eliot, born Mary Anne Evans, was the youngest of five children. She
was particularly close to her brother Isaac, who was the nearest to her in age. Both ‘Brother
and Sister’ and The Mill on the Floss (1860) have at their heart the relationship between an
older brother and a younger sister. The speaker of ‘Brother and Sister’, like Maggie Tulliver,
idolizes her older brother and tries to impress him. Certain scenes in ‘Brother and Sister’ recall
moments in The Mill on the Floss. Both the speaker and Maggie have frightening encounters
with gypsies; both sets of siblings go fishing together, and in both cases the younger sister
catches a fish.
The two works express the Wordsworthian belief that an individual’s childhood
has a powerful effect on his or her adult self. ‘The thoughts and loves of these first years would
always make part of [Maggie and Tom’s] lives,’ says the narrator in The Mill on the
Floss (ch.5), while the speaker of ‘Brother and Sister’ writes that the hours she spent with her
brother were ‘seed to all my after good’ (V).

Resemblance between Lucy and Catherine:

Lucy is the pretty, petite, blond cousin of Tom and Maggie Tulliver. Lucy is
genuinely good-hearted, compassionate person, often thinking about others happiness. She is
also enough of a child of society life, though, that she pays heed to social conventions and to
her own appearance. Lucy is an important alternative to Maggie, and her character makes a
strong statement about the importance of circumstances in influencing characters' lives and
personalities. Lucy’s character forms the conventional feminism. Her character has been
influenced by Catherine, the sister of George Eliot. Some of the similarities between Catherine
and Lucy are that both of them re kind hearted, forgiving and neat as compared to Mary Ann.

Resemblance in Setting:
Marry Ann Evans was born in Warwickshire, England. As the novel reflects
most of autobiographical elements, the setting of novel also depicts some places she had visited
or has spent some time there. For example, most of The Mill on the Floss is set in and around
the fictional town of St. Ogg’s, St. Ogg’s and Dorlcote Mill are actually based on Eliot’s own
childhood home in Warwickshire, England. Warwickshire is a county located in the middle of
England, or the "Midlands." The Midlands were the major site for England’s Industrial
Revolution. This gives us some insight into our characters.
This book is set in past, not very remote, and covered by the memories of the
author herself, or of her family. It drew on people and places from Warwickshire although The
Mill on the Floss is set in Lincolnshire, where she had travelled to with her partner George
Lewes to find suitable rivers for her catastrophic flood, The pair hired a boat and rowed several
miles down the river Trent. Eliot was looking for somewhere with a river big enough to produce
the sort of flood with which The Mill on the Floss ends. She had been disappointed by the river
Frome at Dorchester but found what she wanted in the Trent at Gainsborough. However, the
landscape of The Mill on the Floss is not identical with Gainsborough. Dorlcote Mill is based
on Eliot’s memories of her childhood in Warwickshire and of a visit she paid to a mill near
Weymouth after she had started writing the novel.
Dorlcote Mill closely resembles Arbury Mill, where Mary Ann Evans played
as a child, and the attic where Maggie Tulliver bangs her fetish's head on the beams is the attic
of Griff House, where she spent her first twenty-two years. In The Mill on the Floss, Mudport
is a large city to which Maggie and Stephen Guest travel with the intention of marrying. Eliot
experimented with different names for the city and it is thought to be based on the real city of
Hull located in England
The novel is set around 1820’s since there are numerous historical references
such as events after the Napoleonic war but before the Reform Act of 1832.

Death by drowning:

Death by drowning has been a tragic part of Mary Ann’s life. And it has been
reflected in the closing part of her novel at a crucial stage. In her real life her grandfather
“George Evan” who was a carpenter and a builder died from drowning. And she had seen
people crying in the cruel clutches of flood in her life.
As in the novel:
"The next moment the boat was no longer to be seen on the water. Both
Brother and Sister had drowned in an embrace never to be parted"

She has presented the same scenario of flood. Maggie and her brother Tom
being swallowed by the flood represents the impact of Ann's real life experience.
Winding up the discussion we can say that Mill on the Floss is direct representation of writer's
intimate characteristics.
 The Mill on the Floss is a story of a girl who is far too intelligent for the people
around her to bear. Her relations with a boy who appreciates her intellect and personality is
troublesome and brings a strain on her relationship with her own family members specifically
her brother. These elements along with some others such as setting are close to the life of
George Eliot – Mary Ann herself. She wished that her relationship with her brother Isaac could
be salvaged just like Maggie and Tom’s. this novel is a psychological novel that is deeply
rooted in her own experiences and knowledge.